Looking for a President.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18216, 29 October 1924, Page 8

Looking for a President.

It must be attributed to the All Blacks and to Mr Ramsay Mac Donald that we have approached so near to the American elections without feeliug any excitement. The official day for the selection of the electors (who in turn will select the President) is "the Tuesday "after the first Monday in November" —viz., Tuesday next —and we arc therefore less than a week from what normally is the final flurry. On this occasion, however, Tuesday may not be the day of days, since there is a chance that no candidate will secure a sufficient hedy of support to make his election certain. Apparently, too, it is far from certain what the next step will be if there is an indecisive vote. There are constitutional lawyers who hold that if there is a deadlock iu the electoral college tho term of President Coolidge will end on tho 4tli of March next, and that the new House of Bepresentatives will have no authority to elect a President. But the Senate will have power to elect a Vice-Prosidcut—-if it can—and if it can and does, some argue, the Vice-President will become President. Other authorities say that if there is a deadlock the President, that is Mr Coolidge, will continue in oflico "under prevalent common-law "principles" until tho election and installation of a legal successor, which m-giit be for another full term. And there is still another school which says that under constitutional and statutory law a deadlock would lend automatically to the exaltation of the Secretary of State —at present Mr C. K. Hughes. Many outside America would regard that as the happiest issue of all, since it is of Mr Hughes and not of Mr Coolidge that the world thinks when important international questions nrine. But it is not likely that many people

actually suppose that Mr Hughes will be the next President. The lawyers who are giving opinions arc probably as deep in polities as they are in. law, and if they arc not creating fictitious complications they may be assumed to have more than an academic interest in making the legal position plain. If a deadlock next week is going to mean anything from a stop-gap President to no President at all, wavering voters will think a second time about the third-party candidate. It is in fact the unexpected strength of the third candidate which has made the election so interesting theoretically. Xo one until the eleventh hour took Senator La Follette seriously, but it does really seem—or did, when our last papers to hand were posted —that the Progressives have become a force to lie reckoned with. The '' Literary Digest,'' for example, whose straw votes on important occasions have become a really valuable indication of the state of American opinion, had received well over a quarter of a million returned ballot papers by the end of September, and they proved on analysis distinctly encouraging to Mr La Follette. The first week's results gave Coolidge 16,071 votes from five States, La Follette 5596, and Davis 3792. The second week's, which came now from thirteen States, gave Coolidge 162,473 votes, La

Follette 63,524, and Davis 42,611.

far as Davis is concerned, it was pointed out that with two exceptions the Democratic States had not yet replied, but in the ease of the other two candidates it was agreed that Senator La l-'ollettc was surprising both his enemies and his friends. Of course the total number of voters is between 20 and 30 millions, and since the total number of voting-papers sent out by the "Digest" was 15 millions, the results available at the end of Septem ber were no more than the "first few "ripples of the full flood." A "nation"widc secret Presidential poll" taken by the Hearst newspapers gave La Follette 36,443 votes, Coolidge 34,078, and Davis 15,738, but those figures, even if we could believe in the care and impartiality with which they would be collected, are too small to mean anything. The Hearst newspapers, indeed, confessed plain disgust with the nation's lack of interest in the election. "Apparently," they said, in one of their syndicated editorials, " several "things interest this nation more than "choosing the President. If you announced that the six Presidential and "Vice-Presidential candidates would all "apeak on 'Whither Are We Drifting 1 !' "in Madison Square Garden on one c c niglit, and that the !Prince of Wales "would whistle 'God Save the King' "in the Hippodrome on the same night, "you wouldn't be able to get within "four blocks of the Hippodrome. You "might get a seat in the Garden." However, the Prince has now sailed for England again, and it really is extraordinary that an election which may have sueh strange consequences is making so small a stir.